Читать книгу Catastroika - Charles Rammelkamp - Страница 10

Prologue: Sightseeing in St. Petersburg

The Hermitage? Are you kidding?

The Winter Palace was overwhelming,

but the modest MusEros on Ligovskiy Av.

was the high point.

Sure, we saw the Kolyvan Vase

in the west wing of the Old Hermitage,

largest vase in the world,

like a birdbath for pterodactyls,

after we’d already passed through

the Hall of Twenty Columns,

its amazing mosaic floor,

hundreds of thousands of cubed-tile tesserae;

over three million pieces of art altogether,

largest collection of paintings in the world,

founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, yes,

but the MusEros has Rasputin’s footlong dong

preserved in a glass jar,

severed from the mystic when he was murdered

a hundred years ago, in 1916.

They say just seeing it

can cure a man of impotence.

Did it work?

Maybe it was the exotic unfamiliar surroundings,

St. Petersburg so different from Davenport,

or maybe the aphrodisiac qualities of the vodka,

but when we got back to our room at the Pushka Inn,

I hadn’t felt such ardor for Alexandra

since the steamy backseat of my parents’ car

after football games on crisp Iowa evenings –

my wife’s name the same as the Romanov tsarina

rumored to be Rasputin’s lover.